53 posts from November 2007

Friday, November 30, 2007

Thursday was the 100th anniversary of the day my grandmother, Alice Zorn, was born in Germany. She died in a Bloomington, Ind. nursing home 11 years ago, having outlived my grandfather by three years, and to tell you the truth I seldom think of her anymore.

I was glad for the excuse that the special day afforded to take a look back with love and appreciation, to take stock of all I owe to her and remember all the good times I had visiting the family home.

The details are not particularly extraordinary. Like many women of her era she placed raising a family above developing her professional talent (in her case, mathematics) and was never a famous person. And I bring it up only to promote again the idea that 100th birthdays should be big deals in our families, moreso for those who have died than those who have made it to 100.

Funerals are for sad goodbyes. Centennials are for fond, even joyous farewells as we relinquish our loved ones to the ages; celebrate them and savor the fact of their lives for perhaps one last time.

(Abbreviate with DPN, DVN, RPN, RVN, WIN, TIE if you don't care to cut and paste the above form into your comment.)

If you'd like to offer your explanation and analysis, you may do so on your own blog or Web site by providing a full URL link (including the http part). No other commentary here, please.

Don't predict with your heart; predict with your head. And enter only once. I have a skilled fraud detection unit that will, for instance, sniff out Ron Paul backers who think that posting multiple predictions of his victory will make an impression on the sophisticated, discerning readers of this blog.

The winner will receive fame, approbation, congratulations, the envy and respect of all and perhaps some trinket or doo-dad or cap or T-shirt -- I haven't decided and cannot see that far into the future.

Please leave a valid e-mail address in the message template. It will not be published online or in the paper, nor will I use it for any other purpose than to attempt to contact the winner.

I reserve the right to decline to post patently frivolous or incomplete forecasts.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Sorry, but I'm not buying the story reportedly being told by a male relative of Drew Peterson's: That Peterson enlisted the man's help to move a sealed,
4-foot-long rectangular plastic container from an upstairs bedroom into Peterson's SUV on Oct. 28, the day that Peterson's wife, Stacy, disappeared.

My skepticism is narrowly focused here: I simply doubt very much that Peterson, if he had anything to do with his wife's disappearance as police say they suspect, would have been so clumsy as to have committed such a flagrantly suspicious act in front of someone who was ultimately bound to tell investigators about it.

My colleague Steve Chapman argues in his column this morning against NFL-style, first-team-to-score-wins overtime because the winner of the pre-overtime coin-flip has gone on to win the game 53 percent of the time.

He argues in favor of NCAA-style overtime in which each team gets a chance to score by starting with a first down at the opponent's 25-yard line. The winner of the pre-overtime coin-flip gets to choose whether to have the ball first or last, and has gone on to win the game 55 percent of the time.

Read his column to see how he makes the case that the arbitrary coin flip plays a greater role in the NFL than it does in the NCAA.

When the news broke the other day that the wife of missing Gold Coast adventurer Steve Fossett has asked a Cook County judge to declare him legally dead, your first thought may have been the same as mine:

Doesn’t a person have to be missing for seven years before he’s presumed dead? Fossett’s barely been missing for seven weeks!

It’s actually now a little more than 12 weeks since Fossett flew his airplane alone into the Nevada desert and didn’t come back. But even that comparatively brief absence can be more than enough for the Probate Court to presume him dead and begin distributing his vast wealth.

“Seven years is simply the line in Illinois after which the basic presumption changes,” said Floyd Perkins, a former Illinois assistant attorney general who worked the estate angle in the case of candy heiress Helen Brach, who disappeared in 1977. “Before seven years, anyone who wants you declared legally dead has to offer evidence that you’re not alive. But after you’ve been missing seven years, anyone who wants you declared alive has to offer evidence that you’re not dead.”

Given the almost total lack of evidence either way in the Brach case, she wasn’t declared dead until just a little more than seven years after she vanished.

The line of presumed death isn’t written into our state laws as it is in some other states, in Social Security regulations and in the widely used Uniform Probate Code (which sets the line at 5 years), but it appears in numerous court rulings in Illinois, including, most recently, a 1982 opinion from the Illinois Supreme Court.

“The presumption of death after the unexplained absence of seven years developed after 1800,” wrote law professor Edward Sentell in an extensive 2004 article in Federation of Defense & Corporate Counsel Quarterly. “Prior to that date, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, an absent person was presumed to be living even though he might have been 90 or 100 years old at the time a question arose.”

Sentell’s article, which is included in a webliography of related links posed below, points out that some legal experts have been blasting the seven-year presumption as “arbitrary, unpractical, anachronistic, and obstructive” for more than 100 years.

Seven years does seem like a rather long time to wait given the trail of electronic records that living people tend to leave these days, and given how easy it’s become for us to communicate instantly over great distances. Mysterious disappearances now become ominous in only a matter of hours.

And when someone is last seen in a moment of great peril—in a flood or fire, say—or, as in the Fossett case, headed off into potential danger, the chance that he or she has met an untimely end is far greater than in the case of a simple here-today, gone-tomorrow disappearance.

Yet these are factors that probate judges take into account when considering petitions to having missing persons declared dead, according to Oak Park probate attorney Joel Schoenmeyer, proprietor of “Death and Taxes, the Blog.”

Schoenmeyer pointed out that the sections of the Illinois Compiled Statutes that deal in probate law lay out numerous formal steps that petitioners must take in order to succeed. These include spreading the word far and wide that you’re planning to have a person declared dead, and demonstrating that you’ve diligently searched for the person.

The seemingly extraordinary question then becomes just like many of the ordinary questions that judges face every day: Where does the evidence point?

If the preponderance of evidence points toward death, then the missing person is declared dead. If it points toward life, the legal waiting game continues, sometimes well beyond seven years.

These standards will apply in the Fossett case and, perhaps, someday, in the cases of Lisa Stebic and Stacy Peterson as well as some of the estimated 50,000 other adults that the National Center for Missing Adults says can’t be found.

The answer, Zimmer says in the posting and repeats in an e-mail to me this morning, is a qualified no. His e-mail came in response to my indignant posting yesterday which was based on a far less indignant Tribune editorial, which ...well, let his e-mail tell the story and give an example:

The Tribune editorial....was based on a piece in the Christian Science Monitor, which was full of gross inaccuracies about the Oxford University Press dictionary program, misconstruing information from an ABC World News segment in which I appeared last month. ....) One faulty claim in the CSM piece (repeated in the Tribune editorial) (Zorn note--and in my blog): that OUP dictionaries now consider "reign in" to be an acceptable variant for "rein in." The ABC News segment only discussed "free reign" as a variant for "free rein," so the CSM writer was entirely wrong on this point. That, however, is far from the only error in the CSM article. Its main point, that "the spelling of many terms and expressions, long deemed incorrect [are now] listed as acceptable forms simply because a lot of people use them," is simply untrue. Frequency of use in the corpus of texts that we consult is merely one of many factors that OUP lexicographers consider when making revisions to our dictionaries.....The variant spellings mentioned in the ABC piece were not suddenly added to our dictionaries because we found them being used frequently. In the case of "free reign," the variant has already entered the New Oxford American Dictionary but only in a usage note explaining that it is not considered standard. (That note has nothing to say about "reign in.") As I also discuss in ("Are We Giving Free Rei(g)n to New Spellings?"), "vocal chords" and "straight-laced" are long-standing variants, not recent innovations, and our treatment of these spellings reflect this history appropriately.

In his blog post Zimmer is somewhat reassuring to those who are fretting that Oxford is simply, dutifully enshrining errors as soon as they get common enough:

We’re not looking at the Corpus data and deciding that because, say, just desserts has passed a magical 50% threshold, that means we automatically welcome this spelling as an accepted version of just deserts. Rather, we have to use our best judgment to discern when a popular variant needs to be included and how we present that information in new editions of our dictionaries.

They wait to treat a variation as "dictionary-worthy" until it makes the transition " into reputable mainstream usage," Zimmer writes. And " the vast majority of the variant forms we find never make it into dictionary entries."

This clarification isn't completely satisfying. Both "reputable" and "mainstream" are fuzzy and debatable concepts. It even poses a philosophical conundrum -- if a publication allows an error such as "just desserts" to pass through multiple layers of editorial review, just how reputable is it, really?

Anyway, it's good to know how much study and thought is going into this review process, even though it makes for less punchy blog entry.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Some die-hard purists will greet this show of flexibility with horror, regarding it as a symptom of sloth, debased standards, national decline, moral relativism and looming anarchy....Tribune editorial today on a recent ruling by the Oxford University Press that "vocal chord," "reign in," "baited breath," and "straight-laced" are all now such common errors that they shouldn't be considered errors at all.

Well, it is horrifying. And it's horrifying that one must be branded a "die-hard purist" and made subject to a string of unflattering characterizations if one thinks so.

These are not simplified spellings or agreeable alternates -- they're senseless coinages. Of the four above, only "straight-laced" is a coherent misspelling. The rest are just exhibitions of ignorance.

Dictionaries are often the last bulwark against ignorance and one of their main functions, it seems to me, is to slow the pace of change that sloppiness, laziness and misunderstanding naturally inflict on any language -- to be flexible, yes, but not to yield submissively to those who can't be bothered to learn to spell.

(UPDATE -- Ben Zimmer, an editor at Oxford University Press, has posted some clarifying commentary on this issue here; I have posted a follow-up commentary here)

For instance, it's useful to know, remember and learn that when one speaks of reining something in one is employing the metaphor of the reins on a horse, and that the "reign" of a monarch is a totally different concept.

And it further horrifies me that we -- or at least the editorial board of the Tribune -- shrugs so cheerfully in accepting the ruling of "the people at the venerable Oxford University Press, which publishes various dictionaries."

What's to stop them from decreeing all homonyms equal? No more worrying about the distinction between "too," "two" and "to" that has vexed generations of first graders! No more scratching our heads about "they're," "their" and "there."

Errors on these words are very common, believe me, I edit my message boards here and can't keep up correcting them. But that doesn't mean the distinctions aren't useful or that we should automatically capitulate as soon as some earnest panel of lexicographers decides to wave (not waive, never waive) the white flag.

Careful readers will note that the holiday shopping season is no longer deemed “loathsome” in the new version of the “Let’s Redefine Christmas” ad that takes up all of page 11 of the first section in today’s Tribune.

The ad (click on the photo at right for a larger image) encourages us to give donations to charity in the names of those on our shopping lists. And the altered passage now reads:

No sooner does Thanksgiving end, than the chaotic shopping season begins – a month-long compulsion to buy something, anything, for everyone.

“`Loathsome’ was a very bad choice of words,” said Matt Dalio, speaking on behalf of the Dalio Family Foundation, sponsors of the $2 million campaign that will run through December 20 and kicked off with this ad last week. “It clearly conveyed a message we didn’t intend, and we regret that. We simply want people to consider charitable giving as an option, one that could make their Christmas better.”

Dalio said the change in wording was in response to Tribune readers who last week took issue with “loathsome”– “far over the top,” said one contributor to a comment area I started here; “extreme,” said another; it “really stinks,” added a third – and bristled at the scolding tone.

Just who are these people presuming to trash the exuberant commercialism of the season?

Monday, November 26, 2007

Pandora, the free Internet music service I most often recommend to those who are curious about Web "radio" but don't really know where to start, just added some 20,000 classical music titles to its array of offerings.

Music begins to play through your speakers or computer headphones uninterrupted by commercials or distracting announcements of any kind, making it perfect for background in the home or office. You can leave it active in an otherwise unused window or tab of your browser and, if you ignore it, it shuts itself off after three hours (though it's simple to restart).

I doubt that serious classical music lovers will appreciate this new service. First, I'm guessing that the selections are unadventurous and overly familiar -- greatest hits-like. And second, serious classical music lovers probably can't use it as merely pleasant background noise, which is how I've been using it these last few days and, candidly, how I've always regarded classical music.

I was browsing in a gift shop the other day and ran across a DVD containing episodes of "F Troop," a TV sit-com I watched as a kid and hadn't thought of much since.

One of the photos on the box showed "Wrangler Jane," the hot babe, virtually the only female in the cast. And I wondered, where is she now, more than 40 years later? Here's what I was able to piece together in about 10 minutes of Web searching:

Patterson was 16 when the show debuted (though her character is clearly supposed to be older) and is now 58. Her brief biography at her Web site, WranglerJane.com (where the photo posted above appears), says "Playing the part of Wrangler Jane , a sexy, feisty, fast shooting cowgirl, was the biggest thrill of Melody’s career."

She was married for a time to actor James MacArthur, best known for playing Dan Williams ("book `em, Danno,") in "Hawaii 5-0," and now apparently dabbles in acting while devoting significant energy to "F Troop" nostalgia. (here is a photo of her dated 2001)

In retrospect, "F Troop," like so many of the TV programs of the day, is filled with appalling stereotypes and fractured history (it puts the same jolly gloss on the American treatment of Indians that "Hogans Heroes" put on the Nazi's treatment of war prisoners). I remember enjoying it immensely at the time, though I was 9 when the show went off the air and hadn't seen an episode until Sunday, when I found The Courtship of Wrangler Jane among AOL Video's trove of old F Troop episodes. Glad I didn't buy that DVD.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

With still more than a week until the entry deadline in our politically themed seasonal-song parody contest, and Mary Schmich and I have already received many clever lines and verses.

For example, “I heard Mommy dissing Hillary,” as the opening to a parody of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."

Or this kickoff to the tune of “Let It Snow:”

With Blagojevich acting spitefulNow the CTA is frightfulHow will we get to and fro? Taxes grow! Taxes grow! Taxes grow!

The challenge, issued to readers earlier this month, is to take a familiar winter holiday tune and fit it with lyrics about national or local politics.

For instance, “A Chick in the White House,” which one reader wrote to tune of "Away in a Manger." It begins, “A chick in the White House in 2008/Republicans praying for her Watergate.”

Or a review of the primary field titled, “O Come All Ye Hopefuls.”

It bordered on rude, we know, to ask you to think about Christmas songs so close to Halloween. Carol creep is becoming a problem -- WLIT-FM 93.9 started their round the clock fa-la-la on November 2 this year -- but we had an excuse: We need to pick winners in time to plan out their appearance at our Songs of Good Cheer charity sing-along concerts at the Old Town School of Folk Music auditorium in about three weeks.

We’re experiencing Cheer creep this year as well -– the evening programs, which benefit Chicago Tribune Holiday Giving, have been sold out for a week now, meaning that the hall will be filled with people crazy enough about caroling to make their singing plans before Thanksgiving and we have no excuse to publicize the charity in columns begging you to buy tickets.

About the only chance a procrastinator has to attend this year is to win the contest, which, at this point, is still doable.

As I said, we’ve received many clever lines and verses:

A song about Mayor Richard Daley, Cook County Board President Todd Stroger and Gov. Rod Blagojevich that begins--

We three pols have Illinois’ trustYou wanna taste? What’s in it for us?

A parody that begins--

I heard the pols on Christmas DayStill whining in their familiar way

And a riff on “Good King Wenceslas” that uses the line “Rogue cops beating patrons” and features a verse that starts off --

Junior Stroger got his postIn standard city fashionDaddy greased the way for himWith politics his passion.

But so far there’s no runaway favorite, no single entry so witty, topical and metrically exquisite that it would make the Capitol Steps writhe in envy.;

And what better time than the leisurely aftermath of Thanksgiving to turn your attention to Christmas-related music and mockery?

Entries are due Friday, Nov. 30. Send them by post to Mary Schmich, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Il. 60611 or by e-mail to me at ericzorn@gmail.com.

Winners will join us on stage to sing (or mouth the words) to their parody. They as well as all who plan to attend should visit the Songs of Good Cheer MySpace page to get an educational preview of some of the less familiar songs we’ll be presenting, including Mary’s own composition, “Gonna Sing,” and “Mi Burrito Sabanero,” a peppy Spanish-language carol that will have you saying, “Mmmmmm…Burrito.”

I'd also urge you to visit Chicago Tribune Holiday Giving. It's a truly efficient and comprehensive umbrella charity that puts your donations directly into the hands of agencies and programs that help our area’s neediest people.

Chicago Tribune Charities, a McCormick Tribune Foundation Fund, shoulders all the fundraising costs with not so much as a dime of your donation going to administrative overhead or to voice lessons for me.

I was curious about that full-page ad that appeared in the Tribune earlier this week telling us, "Let's redefine Christmas by putting more Thanksgiving into it." Thinking you might be, too, I went in search of answers:

Q. Did the ad run only in the Tribune?

A. No, it also ran the same day in the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, according to the agency that placed the ad on behalf of the Dalio Family Foundation. (see the news release below)

Q. What's the Dalio Family Foundation?

A. Six members of the wealthy Dalio family; it's based in Westport, Conn. and supports a variety of causes. Son Matt Dalio founded the China Care Foundation, which provides medical and other forms of assistance to Chinese orphans.

Q, Does the Dalio Family Foundation have a Web site?

A. No. Nor does it have a listed phone number.

Q. What's up with that?

A. The foundation doesn't seek or solicit attention of any sort, nor
does it accept donations from the public, according to Ryan Geraghty, a
spokesman I was able to reach by following a telephone trail back
through our display ad department. "We have no angle or ulterior
motive," he said. "We simply want the ideas in the ad to speak for
themselves."

The campaign itself purports to have a Web site, Redefine-Christmas.com but last I checked it was utterly blank.

Q. The ad refers to the Christmas shopping season as
"loathsome." Has there been any pushback from newspapers that, after
all, rely on retail advertising to pay quite a bit of the freight?

A. None at all, Geraghty said. The ad ran last year in selected papers --in the Tribune on 12/12/07 and 12/18/07 and is slated to run again this year on 11/27, 12/4, 12/11, 12/17 and 12/20 . The reported cost of the campaign is $2 million.

Q. What's the public response been to the ad?

A. The foundation has no way of tracking this and apparently no real interest, either. Judging from the comments here,
the answer is that response is decidedly mixed, reflecting the
ambivalence many of us feel about criticizing a phenomenon that's so
important to so many economically. Garish and excessive though it may
be, tens of thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- of jobs depend on the
spending surge at the end of the year. And, let's be honest, it's fun
to get gifts and indulge in a little excess now and then.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Gun control has been a simmering, back-burner issue in American politics for years -- deeply important to relatively small few on either end of the question but not an animating concern for many voters.

Polls show gun policy ranks low on the list voter concerns -- 15th in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll taken in May-- in part because law and policy changes have been incremental and a certain dynamic has held as local gun laws have tended to mollify all but the most engaged and mainstream Democrats and Republicans have staked out moderate, compromise positions for and against tough restrictions on gun ownership.

The government of Washington, D.C., is asking the court to uphold its 31-year ban on handgun ownership in the face of a federal appeals court ruling that struck down the ban as incompatible with the Second Amendment.

As we wait for the high court to hear the case, gun policy will inevitably become an issue in the presidential primary races where it hasn't been much of an issue so far. And if the court rules the D.C. ban is unconstitutional, many other local bans and restrictions stand to fall depending on the legal reasoning, and liberal voters in particular may end up extremely energized.

Guns stand to become gay marriage for the left: An issue that will drive base-voter turnout and enthusiasm based on a gut feeling that the courts have gone too far and must be stopped.

Opinion polling on guns suggests that only about 10 percent of Americans want gun controls to be less strict (though they are 2-1 opposed to handgun bans) and I wouldn't be surprised to see a movement among Democrats and liberals to repeal or revise the 2nd Amendment.

For gun-rights advocates, today is a red-letter day, one they've been waiting for decades.

"I'm on cloud nine," said Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation, minutes after the order from the Supreme Court was handed down Tuesday....

Gottlieb has reason to be optimistic. While the modern court hasn't ruled on the scope of the Second Amendment, its conservative majority may be inclined to make an emphatic statement about gun ownership as an individual right. And, as Gottlieb points out, the worst-case scenario -- a statement from the high court denying that such a right exists -- would galvanize the gun lobby and its supporters into furious political action during an election year.

But the old adage, "Be careful what you wish for..." comes to mind. As does the concept of backfire.

You’ve always given me good advice, yet this time I chose to ignore it.

Late last month, Apple Computer Inc. released Leopard, a shiny upgrade on its operating system for Macs. I was particularly tempted by its automatic, hourly backup program, “Time Machine,” which promises ongoing, effortless protection against dreaded and inevitable hard-drive failures.

“This looks perfect,” I said, noting that both of us are bad about archiving our photos, documents and music.

“Give it a few months,” you told me. “These new software releases always have bugs.”

How old school of you, I thought. Apple—which prides itself on stability, security and service—wouldn’t bombard me with seductive e-mails about the $129 upgrade if it hadn’t been thoroughly debugged. Would it?

Monday, November 19, 2007

The following full-page display ad sponsored by the Dalio Family Foundation appears in the front section of today's Tribune:

In case you can't read the fine print, it says:

No sooner does Thanksgiving end than the loathsome shopping season begins -- a month-long compulsion to buy something, anything, for everyone. We're pressed. We're stressed. And our money is wasted. But we can change all that by focusing on the giving. And redefining Christmas.

Give people donations to their favorite charities.

And request that they give donations to your favorite charities.

A lot more money would go to people who need it. Shopping would be easier and tax deductible. And our giving would be more in keeping with the Christmas spirit.

The sole purpose of this message is to facilitate charitable giving. Please pass it on.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

In a post-checkup chit-chat the other day, my kids'
dentist, Charles Czerepak, brought up an angle on Chicago's new
bottled-water tax that I hadn't considered: To the extent that it
drives people back to good old tap water, the five-cents-a-bottle levy
will be good for our teeth.

"We've seen an increase in decay on
the second molars in recent years," Czerepak said when I called back to
get an on-the-record quote. "Our impression is that it's related to
kids drinking lots of bottled water, most of which doesn't have
fluoride."

About "Change of Subject."

"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
More about Eric Zorn

Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.